The Waves

First published in 1931, The Waves is the sixth and most experimental novel by the English author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). A 2015 BBC poll voted it the sixteenth greatest English novel of all time. (Woolf’s novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were second and third.)

The novel consists of the internal monologues of six characters—Bernard, Jinny, Neville, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis—as they move through their lives from childhood to old age in twentieth-century England. It is punctuated by lyrical passages describing the course of the sun over the sea in a single day. A seventh character, Percival, is a major focus, though he never appears directly.

Although The Waves vividly and startlingly describes physical details on every page with, it also seems like a single reverie flowing through its six distinct but inextricably connected personae: Bernard, the gentleman always searching for the right phrase; Jinny, desperate for love; Louis, a successful businessman from Australia who feels like an outsider; the moody and erratic Rhoda; solid, practical Susan, who marries a farmer; and Neville, constantly pining for Percival, whom he loves.

Readers who make their way through the novel begin to sense that these figures are all personae of an one unseen character, out of whom they all arise. As Bernard says at one point, “I do not believe in separation. We are not single.”

Reading The Waves challenges and shifts our ordinary perceptions about reality. Its depth and profundity have inspired many readers to go back to it over and over, finding new dimensions and meanings each time.

Despite its sharp precision of detail, The Waves, as its title suggests, portrays time and life as an undulating flow across the years. Perhaps its ultimate message is that although we perceive reality as solid, in actuality it is fluid.

Nearly 100 years after its initial publication, The Waves remains as fresh, daring, and unforgettably bracing as ever.